Metrics that Matter: Antonio Brown lit up the Cowboys

We're fully into our second week of Metrics That Matter. This week we’re counting down the top-five Actual Opportunity weeks of the 2016 season.

If you’re unfamiliar with Actual Opportunity, I highly recommend reading the introduction here. Essentially, with Actual Opportunity we’re building out a player’s expected fantasy points based on the opportunity they saw in any given week or over the course of a full season. Each week during the regular season I’ll look at players by their Actual Opportunity numbers in an attempt to identify players who may be undervalued or overvalued relative to their expectation and their DFS salary.

Continuing our countdown of the top-five Actual Opportunity weeks of the 2016 season, today our focus is on the player-week ranking No. 3 – Antonio Brown, in his Week 10 campaign against the Dallas Cowboys. This week, he totaled 37.0 Actual Opportunity points, and came fairly close in fantasy points with 34.4. It should be worth noting that fellow teammate Le’Veon Bell also saw a strong workload himself in Week 10, as we covered on Monday.

Here’s the top five so far:

5. Le'Veon Bell (Week 10) – 33.7 AO/34.3 PPR
4. Odell Beckham Jr. (Week 16) – 35.8 AO/26.0 PPR
3. Antonio Brown (Week 10) – 37.0 AO/34.4 PPR
2. ???
1. ???

Brown’s inclusion on this list was guessed by reader Matt Gajewski (@BiasedTuna). See if you can guess the top wide receiver week (No. 2 overall) and the top running back week (No. 1 overall). First person to get the answer correctly (player and week) in the article’s comments or by mentioning me on Twitter will get a shout-out in one of the next articles.

Now, let’s dig a little deeper into Brown’s Week 10.

Receiving (18 targets)

Rushing (One carry)

On 18 targets and an 8.8-yard average depth of target, Brown recorded 14 catches for 154 yards and a score. He had three deep targets (balls traveling 20 or more yards in the air) and saw four targets while in the end zone. He racked up the majority of his fantasy points by converting one of these end-zone targets (for 15 yards) as well as adding 31 yards after the catch on ball thrown 13 yards through the air. Week 10 was a shootout the whole way through, where Ben Roethlisberger totaled 408 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions. It was the most points Dallas allowed all regular season.

Brown has ranked top-three among wide receivers in Actual Opportunity per game in each of the past three seasons. His 2016 season actually saw him decline by more than two Actual Opportunity points per game over the average of the two prior seasons, though he was more efficient in 2016 on a per-target basis (in terms of Actual Opportunity) than in any season prior.

Here’s how Brown did over the course of a full season: